If you’re among our regular readers, you probably know by now that we’re pretty big fans of Twelve South’s product lineup — their stands and cases are well-made and fit in so well with the Mac aesthetic that they could have been designed by Apple. However, we also like it when accessory makers allow a little bit of personality to show through, and this is the case with Twelve South’s latest offering: A free collection of stunning wallpapers from the company’s own hometown that are specifically designed to look great on a dual-monitor setup. Twelve South’s new Charleston at Sea Level collection is actually the fifth collection the company has released since 2014, but is unique among these in that it features the company’s own hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, rather than the more popular tourist areas of prior collections.

If you’re looking to carry your MacBook around in style, you’ll want to check out the new MacBook Leather Sleeves from Swedish brand Woolnut. These new luxurious cases feature full-grain vegetable-tanned leather on the exterior with an interior lining made from 100% natural wool felt. The sleeves are available in black or cognac leather colors, both of which feature a light natural grey wool felt interior.

Booq is one of our favourite bag makers, with very stylish bags that are durable and provide good storage capacity, so we were definitely excited by the company’s latest new bag, the Nerve, black. It’s a full messenger bag with a ballistic nylon exterior, a water-repellant flap, and a well-padded interior laptop compartment. It’s a great bag for all of your summer excursions — it will withstand the elements for your weekend getaways but still looks nice enough to take to the office on Monday morning.

If you’re a Mac user looking to set up a true power user’s workstation, then you’ll want to take a look at Kensington’s new SD5000T Thunderbolt 3 Docking Station, a single relatively unobtrusive expansion dock that takes advantage of all of the bandwidth available in a single Thunderbolt 3 cable to tie all of your high-performance peripherals into your MacBook Pro, and keep it powered up at the same time. With a single Thunderbolt 3 cable connected to your MacBook Pro, the SD5000T can provide 85W of charging power and push through 40Gbps of data — more than enough for a few high-performance external hard drives and a couple of 4K displays.

Apple’s latest version of GarageBand for Mac has added Touch Bar support for the newest MacBooks and a newly designed interface. Users working on a MacBook with a Touch Bar can now use that to quickly navigate through a project or even perform instruments in a similar way to how iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch devices are used as Touch Instruments on GarageBand for iOS. Three new Drummers have also been added in Pop, Songwriter, and Latin styles. The app is still free and available for download in the Mac App Store.

Although Apple’s venerable silver brushed aluminum design is still what most of us visualize when we think “MacBook,” Apple has of course been changing it up a bit in recent years, creating some challenges for finding accessories that perfectly complement the Apple aesthetic. Fortunately, Twelve South is on top of it, recently updating its iconic BookArc for MacBook with a new Space Grey colour option that will appeal to users who prefer the darker side of the MacBook family. Let’s face it, a lot of MacBook owners consider their laptops an art piece to be displayed, and in that case, putting a Space Grey MacBook Pro into a silver BookArc just won’t work.

Few will argue that Apple’s latest MacBook Pros look great, but one small but important thing that they’ve lost in their quest for aesthetics is the traditional security slots used for locking them down. Even if you never leave your MacBook unattended in a coffee shop, there are a lot of office environments where securely tethering your MacBook is a good idea — especially since these days it’s not just the hardware you need to worry about, but the data that’s stored on your laptop falling into the wrong hands. Fortunately, Kensington has a solution in the form of its new Laptop Locking Station 2.0, a base station that allows you to secure your laptop on your desk without adding unnecessary bulk, sacrificing convenience, or requiring that you install anything on your MacBook.

IK Multimedia has built a well-deserved reputation for creating powerful and authentic digital music tools, and the company’s new Syntronik is sure to be another hit with musicians. The new virtual synthesizer promises to take the virtual instrument game up another big notch with 38 iconic synths and string machines samples with IK Multimedia’s usual attention to detail. The app features a new hybrid sampling and modelling synthesis engine combined with a large set of high-quality modelled effects. Over 2,000 preset sounds are included that cover a huge selection of vintage synths, including some ultra-rare classic synthesizers that few will ever have an opportunity to lay their hands on.

yntronik includes 17 amazing instruments, available as a collection or separately, with over 2,000 preset sounds covering a wide selection from 38 of the most iconic to ultra-rare and painstakingly multi-sampled vintage synthesizers. Syntronik’s synthesis engine goes well beyond traditional sampling thanks to a brand new analog modeled filter section created with the utmost expertise from IK, the pioneer in virtual crcuit modeling. This is coupled with exclusive DRIFT™ technology to accurately reproduce the behavior of oscillators from real hardware synths. All of this combined with an effects section that is unrivaled in the world of virtual instruments along with advanced features like 4-part layers, splits and arpeggiators make Syntronik the ultimate source of inspiration with the widest palette of synthesizer sounds ranging from exact reproductions of the originals to sounds never heard before that will stand out from the crowd in productions covering any genre and style.

More than half a year after its release, Aspyr Media has brought its action-adventure game Mafia III ($40) to the Mac. The third-person shooter follows Vietnam veteran Lincoln Clay as he uses the skills he learned in war to avenge the deaths of his mob brethren at the hands of the Italian mob. The game features epic gun fights, intense hand-to-hand combat situations, plenty of fast-paced driving and more subtle spoken interactions showing off the main character’s street smarts as Clay attempts to rebuild what he lost and rise to the top of his city’s criminal underworld. The game is large and graphically intensive, requiring some pretty daunting minimum system requirements — a minimum four-core Intel i5 3.2 GHz CPU and an AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics card with at least 2GB of VRAM — so only users with a recent iMac or a mid-2015 or later MacBook Pro can really play it.

There have been a lot of concerns raised over the past few months about Apple’s decision to go strictly USB-C with its new 2016 MacBook Pro lineup, but fortunately as always third-party vendors are happy to step in with solutions that fill the void. Satechi’s new Type-C Pro Hub ($100) provides another missing puzzle piece, taking your shiny new MacBook Pro beyond the four USB-C ports to add just about everything else you might need while adding minimal bulk.

Bloop has rolled out a handy update to Airmail 3 for Mac ($10), its advanced e-mail client that it debuted last year, adding some key improvements that all heavy e-mail users can appreciate. The app now provides the ability to set an auto-response for when you’re out of the office and includes new HTML templates to make it quick and easy to send polished messages. The update also adds support for the Bear write and DEVONthink knowledge management apps, making it simpler to transfer text from either source into an email. Google legacy accounts are also now supported as well, and privacy enhancements offer more peace of mind that you’re the only one reading your messages.

Blizzard Entertainment has made its iconic StarCraft military strategy game free for Mac users ahead of the release of StarCraft: Remastered, a new version of the classic game complete with crisply updated graphics. For those who haven’t already invested countless hours in this series, StarCraft puts the player in the middle of a struggle for survival between three space-faring races: humans (or Terrans in the game), the buglike Zerg and the mysterious Protoss. Each race has its own units and structures with unique abilities, leaving the player to gather resources and figure out how to best upgrade their forces to combat a variety of threats. The free download also includes the StarCraft: Brood War expansion.

If you’re anything like us, you probably have more duplicate photos laying around your Mac than you know how to deal with, especially considering the multiple tools Apple has created over the years for managing photos. We’ve been through iPhoto, and then Aperture, and now the macOS Photos app, and since digital memories are often precious, it’s not uncommon to be a little reluctant to trash a folder of photos unless you’re absolutely certain that you’ve got a copy somewhere else. So unless you’re hardcore about spending time keeping your file system and photo libraries in pristine order, chances are you’ve got duplicate folders of photos sitting around in dusty corners of your filesystem. Enter PhotoSweeper 3.0 ($10), OverMacs’ latest update to our favorite app for dealing with duplicate photos across all of your libraries and filesystems. Version 3.0 adds a great new “side-by-side” view that lets you much more easily compare photos from two distinct sources, ensuring that you’re only cleaning up photos from one place while ignoring duplicates within each group. So you could put your Apple Photos library on one side, and a folder full of JPGs on the other to easily eliminate those that you’ve already imported.

Logitech’s new MK850 Performance Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Comb is the company’s latest in its lineup of input devices for power users, combining a full-featured ergonomic keyboard with the company’s M720 Triathlon wireless mouse. Although the MK850 doesn’t exactly have a Mac-like aesthetic, don’t let that fool you, as Logitech’s Options software is fully Mac-compatible and Mac-aware, providing support for controlling all of the usual keyboard functions, and mapping mouse gestures to swiping between desktops, bringing up Mission Control, LaunchPad, Exposé, and more. Further, Logitech has introduced a new “DuoLink” feature that pairs the mouse and keyboard to work together, allowing a second set of actions and gestures to be assigned to the mouse buttons that can be triggered when holding down the Fn key on the keyboard. For example, if you regularly listen to music on your Mac, you could set up the mouse so that holding down Fn and middle-clicking or tilting the scroll wheel pauses or switches between tracks, or scrubs forward and backward between tracks.

While we don’t normally get all that enthused about cables, if you need a USB-C cable for your new MacBook Pro that will withstand just about anything, you’ll want to take a look at Belkin’s new DuraTek USB-C cable ($30). Inspired by industrial cabling, race car and aerospace construction methods, this new USB-IF certified cable features Kevlar-reinforced conductors that protect the wires inside, a double-braided nylon cable jacket, and longer, flexible strain relief to help absorb bending stresses. As cables go, it’s also one of the more attractive designs we’ve seen.